Virgin Gaming Partners With Microsoft for Browsable Xbox Live Tournaments

Virgin Gaming and Microsoft have announced a new partnership that will allow Xbox Live Gold subscribers to browse, enter and track tournaments directly from their consoles with the new Xbox LIVE Tournaments Service app.

Some tourneys will be free, and some will be paid-entry, but Virgin promises to offer competitions for all skill levels across a wide variety of games.

“It was always our dream to have the Virgin Gaming tournament experience seamlessly integrated into consoles,” said Billy Levy, President and Co-founder of Virgin Gaming, in a press release. “The new application on Xbox LIVE delivers unparalleled accessibility for all gamers to compete like never before in the biggest tournaments, for the biggest prizes with a growing selection of new games to choose from.”

"Our goal is to deliver a play experience that makes tournaments fun and accessible, in a way that resonates with both the core and casual Xbox gamer, and we’ve found a partner that shares that same vision," said Xbox Live General Manager Alex Garden. "By teaming up with Virgin we are able to match their expertise in operating a tournament service with our large and highly engaged community on XboxLIVE.”

Virgin Gaming operates tournaments on a variety of platforms, with a community of 1.3 million gamers partners like EA Sports, 2K Sports and Ubisoft and a custom skill ranking system that will likely transfer over to the Xbox LIVE Tournaments Service.

Are you ready to put your skills to the test (and possibly win some prize money along the way)? Let us know what you think about Virgin's Xbox LIVE Tournaments Service in the comments or on Twitter.